COVID Chronicles: Picking the Easy Answer
As a doctor, I want to start making some comments and observations on the most serious health threat to face us in recent years. Thus I begin my “COVID Chronicles.”
If there’s one thing we can be sure of in this life (beyond death and taxes), is that people, when given a choice, will usually gravitate to the easiest solution to a problem. Whether it’s out of sheer desire for simplicity in life, decision fatigue, boredom, evil intent, or because sometimes we’re just plain stupid, the quickest, easiest answer usually wins.
Searching for Answers
So it is with all the issues surrounding the 2019-2020-(2021?) SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. There are so many potential issues and health concerns with this pandemic, that many people searching for answers and advice have simply chosen the wide, easy path.
Certainly the mask controversy is proof enough of that. We can also claim the same for the tendency people have to blame President Trump for causing it all. Yes, I’ve actually seen Facebook and Twitter posts literally claiming he actually killed 180,000+ people (at least as of the middle of June).
The Blame Game
Now, many people (those with some actual intelligence) will already see through that, and realize that although Mr Trump may have not always made the best decisions during the pandemic as it relates to the US, it is not possible for his decisions to actually kill thousands of people. The reason is simple – one man could not possibly control every single move made by every single American.
This “blame-game” is simply simple people refusing to take responsibility for their own actions… and that’s a game that’s as old as Adam and Eve (or the first homo sapiens, if you’re one of those who refuse to believe that G-d exists).
But beyond the blame game which – let’s face it – has been present with some conservatives and so absolutely rampant with liberals that it alone can be classified as an epidemic of mental disease, there’s a larger, earlier truth that many people are either deliberately or mistakenly ignoring.
For that truth, we have to go back to the beginning (as near as we can) to China.
The Beginning
Though the exact timeline and source (host) are still disputed, the fact remains that at sometime in the latter portion of 2019, a new virus was detected in China, and effectively centered in the area of Wuhan. It grew rather rapidly to epidemic levels in the province, and somewhere during those relatively early days, the virus was given the moniker “SARS-CoV-2” for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the original SARS virus (since renamed “SARS-CoV-1”) also appeared to originate in China… but I’m not delving into conspiracy theories of Chinese communist scientists playing Dr Evil and creating viruses to kill off the whole earth.
Soon thereafter, the WHO got involved (given their top-level bureaucratic corruption, that should have been a warning sign right there) and an epidemic (and later a pandemic) was declared, and typically the response from our glorious disappointment of a president was typical extreme right-wing crap, dubbing it “Wuhan flu” among other more derogatory and racist names which his MAGA Q-anon conspiracy theory crowd rapidly lapped up and spread all over social media.
The Initial Response
More accurately though, the syndrome (or disease if you prefer) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus was named “COVID-19” – certainly by some flunkie on acid, because one would think that a serious disease should have a more medical-sounding name.
This pretty much brings us to the source of the problem: China (again). When the epidemic was growing and many foreign nationals living and working in Wuhan and surrounding areas were falling ill despite rather rapid (for the Chinese) response to the outbreak and strict quarantines and lockdowns being enabled, many countries and their nationals living under the lockdowns and quarantines, wanted out.
The BBC documented this very well at least regarding British nationals begging Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “save them” and bring them home. Many other nations, including the US, experienced the same begging and pleading by their citizens, when it was clear that initially the Chinese weren’t going to allow anyone to leave their local areas, whether or not they were not Chinese citizens.
And… that brings us to the two major reasons why a Chinese epidemic became a pandemic practically overnight… wait for it…
